


Raspberry Rose Tea (One Spoonful of Sugar)

by oriflamme



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Palestuck 2016, Post-Sburb, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-15
Updated: 2016-03-15
Packaged: 2018-05-26 21:27:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,115
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6256543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oriflamme/pseuds/oriflamme
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>More often than not, it's Karkat who needs soothing.</p><p>Today is not one of those days.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Raspberry Rose Tea (One Spoonful of Sugar)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [B100b100d](https://archiveofourown.org/users/B100b100d/gifts).



Karkat is not due back home for another hour.

Staying together with the others had proven unacceptable; the survivors of the game initially established their relationships in the cauldron of extremely traumatic circumstances, and once they found themselves on the winning side of the door, those relationships had largely proven improvident. The main deal breaker for most relationships turned out the untimely demise of one or more of the parties involved, rather than simple incompatibility, but for a while there Karkat and Nepeta held a grim competition to see who could better predict which quadrant pairing would fall apart next. Nepeta's shipping wall is far smaller these days; they lost almost as many people as they brought back.

The greatest blasphemy came when Terezi went outside the pool of game players entirely and sunk her teeth into a vigorous black fling with a lawyer at a rival law firm. Kanaya suspects it's for the best that a few of them branch out a bit. Things were getting claustrophobic, for a while there. She would speculate that there is at least an eighty percent chance Terezi is only involved in this particular relationship due to the fact that Vriska's absence is a very loud hole in all of their lives, but the remaining twenty percent comes down to the fact that there's only eleven people out of an eight human and twelve troll endgame team left, and trying to sort out quadrants for everyone with such reduced numbers was just ridiculous.

But both of her primary quadrants have survived the upheaval, with some luck, communication, and the cultivation of a great deal of patience. Rose stays with Jade and John for the most part, the three of them engaged in a uniquely human best friendallegiance that suits them remarkably well, but expecting Karkat to live in the close quarters of the humans' shared communal hive put far too much stress on him, and after the strain he put on his pusher in the last battle, Kanaya elects to stay with him in an apartment down the street. He takes vicious pleasure in negotiating with Rose over their schedule for Kanaya's free time, which Kanaya endorses because it turns out to be a logical, sound method of ensuring neither her moirail nor her matesprit wind up feeling neglected. Rose is in no way shy about coolly asserting herself when Karkat gets blustery and loud, but she's also sharp enough to catch on when Karkat shuts down to conceal insecurities rather than admit he needs more time with Kanaya on a given week.

Today, the first thing Kanaya does once she's through the door is message Rose an apology in advance for not being able to attend the humans' weekly movie night. It is generally an interesting outlet, and this week would have been a chance for Kanaya to catch up with Feferi and Jane, who spend most of their time in a small town on the coast and rarely come inland except for birthdays, wriggling day celebrations, and the game's end anniversary.

However, at the moment Kanaya finds herself in a mindset more conducive to curling up into the pupation position in a corner of the room and covering her head with a blanket. Her grip on the phone doesn’t relax until Rose's lavender text assures her that it's perfectly alright. Then she plugs it in to charge with a hand that seems to have forgotten how to relax; she goes through the motions of her usual after work routine, but the tension stringing along her shoulders and down her back leaves her clumsy and jittery. She drops the plastic pitcher that she's taking down from the upper cupboard into the sink, and the loud _clunk_ as the empty pitcher hits the stainless steel and bounces makes her jump, unpleasant vibrations crawling through the marrow of her horns. It takes her a full two minutes to collect herself and go about the process of watering the window box verbena and snapdragons, and she makes the executive decision not to attempt to trim the bonsai today. After a day of startling badly and stabbing her claws on her needle at the sound of the bell every time someone came in to see her about fabric or a quick tailoring job, it's just not a good idea. The echeveria in their planter on the balcony still have damp soil, and she leaves them alone.

Haha. Leaves. That is definitely one to share with Karkat. She's used it many times before, and each time his comically exaggerated despair becomes a little sillier. Perhaps when she feels a little more in a mood for fun, nonsensical pun-based shenanigans. Right now, she switches her focus to getting a kettle of water on the stovetop without burning herself, and then begins the process of marshalling the scattered blankets, pillows, cushions, and assorted other random paraphernalia into a respectable pile. There's never a shortage of scrap fabric when Kanaya is in the middle of a large project, but Karkat always compares the texture of velvet to the sensation of a nail file on claws, and she tosses any that she finds into the far corner. The curtains and tapestries hung on the walls have easy to release catches for precisely this sort of situation, and she's able to lower them to cover the western window and plunge the main block into comfortable half-light. The southern window she opens a crack to let in fresh air, though she lowers a lighter curtain there as well so that the light dims further. That done, she makes use of the sofa as the main substance under the pile for convenience's sake, tucking blankets over the back and anchoring them with stacks of romance books (hers and Karkat's) and random knick knacks, alchemized items that once had a purpose, before the game ended and a great many things became inert lumps of junk.

The kettle on the stove starts making an ominous whining sound by the time Kanaya lays out the first stratum of pillows under the blankets, and she hurries over before it can cross into outright whistling. One more sudden, high pitched noise today will be more than she can bear. Adjusting pillows to maximize pile efficiency didn't require much exactitude with her claws, but here again she almost knocks an entire tin of chamomile tea off the rack, and the near miss leaves her kneading at the countertop with her knuckles, drawing on the last, thready remnants of her calm in an effort to collect herself. It only does a little good, though. Her reserves are well and truly exhausted, and, irrationally upset at the chamomile for betraying her this way, Kanaya considers gloomily that perhaps performing an athletic maneuver of some kind off of a perfectly innocuous piece of furniture might not be out of the question. She picks up the raspberry rose loose leaf instead and sets it to steep, before straightening her shoulders, lifting her chin, and going back to the pile to finish piecing it together to her satisfaction.

But even once she has a veritable nest of blankets and cushions to bury herself in, she's restless and ill at ease, wandering the apartment and lighting candles with immense care not to leave them near the lowered curtains. Karkat is still at least a half an hour out, depending on how late he stayed at the library and how behind schedule the trolley line is running from downtown today, but every moment since lunch, Kanaya has felt like she's been scraped raw all over with the wrong end of a grater, and coming home can only assuage it to a certain degree. Just for a moment, she entertains unhelpful thoughts of calling Karkat outright, but there's a good reason she left her phone charging on the counter by the door, out of easy reach. If she calls to check where he is, he will know that there is something afoot, but there's no way to make traffic move any faster at this time of day. He would only fret and work _himself_ up into a concerned lather, beating himself up over not having the power to instantaneously teleport home (none of them have that power anymore, unfortunately), and that would rather defeat her purpose in general.

All she can do is take the tea off when it finishes steeping, add the appropriate amounts of sugar and cream to each mug in turn, and then take it with her into the blanket sanctuary, lying out flat on her back and staring at the apex of the draped fabric overhead to try to lose herself in the pattern of the weave until Karkat arrives. Her raw disquiet doesn't quite subside as she forces herself to count mental stitches, but gradually the scent from the flickering candles and the steaming tea starts to uncoil the tight spiral of nausea in her digestive system. It is a mild improvement.

Karkat arrives with a wonderfully familiar bang twenty minutes later - his key jams into the lock and he snarls over it for a good thirty seconds before realizing that Kanaya has left door unlocked for him; then he kicks it open with a degree of force that reads, to Kanaya's well-honed ears, as indicative of a relatively low level of chagrin. Working at the library was meant to be a low stress job for Karkat where he could also, by clever design, have easy access to the romance section and put books on hold for them. Kanaya has instead come to terms with the fact that for Karkat, _any_ job is a source of stress, by virtue of the fact that Karkat's aggravation glands have a seemingly limitless capacity for inflaming his brain with excess vexation fluid. Kanaya is fairly certain that is not actually how either troll or human emotions or bodily functions work, but Karkat's turns of phrase tend to be catching, no matter how puzzling they can be, and it's certainly as good a phrase as any to describe how Karkat now drives himself up the wall over people letting their small children remove entire shelves full of picture books and strew them all over the floor in a perfect example of the entropic forces of the new universe coming together to personally shit on his day.

Or so she's been told.

Karkat's keys clatter across the counter, and his bag hits the floor with the heavy thud of book spines taking one for the team. Kanaya can track his grumbling path through the kitchen by the shuffle of his shoes and the sound of drawers opening. "The next time we decide to let carapacians design the world's transit system because we're a bunch of lazy fucking stooges, I will personally ascend to hatetier and strangle us all with those preposterous excuses for shitwipes that we call capes," he informs her, a fairly standard greeting for the day. "Oh, my throbbing phlegm lobe, I shouldn't have to go on a fucking odyssey through the darkest shittunnels of the mother grub herself to get from point a to point go fuck yourself." Kanaya closes her eyes and lets the clatter of Karkat pattering around sink in. "If I make chili out of a can and dump it on rice, will you still respect me in the morning and call it haut cuisine when Egbert asks? That fucker's still being an asinine fucksponge about the frozen pizza incident."

Kanaya hums noncommittally, without opening her eyes. The sounds from the kitchen quiet a little, though she picks up on the two irregularly spaced _clomp_ s of Karkat toeing off his shoes and kicking them out of the way. Just having his chatter fill the room sets something in the deepest, most fundamental parts of her mind at ease, and she laces her claws together over her stomach, flexing and closing them in the hopes that it'll work the stiff jitters out of them before Karkat notices her current state. There's a small but undeniable part of her that would rather she never got to this point - the times where she finds herself jolting at sudden noises and fumbling basic tasks because she's gone over some arbitrary mental limit are few and far between, and she'd much prefer they stayed that way.

She's so busy attempting to relax, one ear listening for the sound of Karkat wielding his specibus instead of getting out the can opener (something they have both been guilty of depending on how rambunctious the kitchen antics on any given night), that the rustle of the fabric overhead almost filters past her before she becomes aware of Karkat crouching down just outside the confines of the pile nest. Her eyes pop open with a sharper jolt than usual, and she blinks at him for a second before the concerned look on his face registers. "Uh. Not...not a good day?" he says, and the difference in volume between this and his usual shout is palpable. There's an undercurrent of trepidation in his voice, that Kanaya understands from a general perspective.

It isn't that having to rely on Karkat as opposed to the other way around for emotional support is bad. To the contrary, really. She's just far more comfortable being the one soothing and pacifying, rather than the one soothed. It's unfortunately not her strong suit. Kanaya had to personally put a moratorium on Rose's efforts to psychoanalyze the implications of that before Karkat could take personal offense and lose his temper on her, leading to strife in their households. "I guess you could say that is an accurate summary of the situation," she says, feeling silly.

"Oh. Uh. Fuck, then." Karkat shifts his weight, one hand going down to steady himself on a pillow as he glances around the blanket fort. He finds the tea just before he nearly puts a knee down in one of the mugs, and then pulls back. "I'll be back in a second, okay?" he promises, his shadowed eyes looking torn.

Kanaya inclines her head in as much of a nod as she can manage, given the circumstances. "I don't intend to move in the near future," she says. Watching Karkat hastily stand up and vanish back out of sight of the open crack in the blankets doesn't do much for her peace of mind, but immediately she hears the sounds of Karkat shaking down the kitchen and yanking open the microwave, muttering swears under his breath with increasing frequency the longer he's gone.

The fountain of expletives dies down again just in time for Karkat to reappear and crawl under the blankets, lingering irritation from whatever he's done in the poor, unsuspecting kitchen overriding the earlier self-consciousness. "Okay. Can I sit? In about five minutes we're going to have steaming hot, freshly microwaved chili."

Relief pours down Kanaya's spine, even before she moves. "Of course," she says, moving on autopilot to roll up and let Karkat situate himself in the pile. Once he's awkwardly ensconced himself in the thickest part of the cushions, he puts a careful hand on her shoulder, and Kanaya lies back down, her legs curling up a little as she smooshes her face against his sternum. In her juddery rush, she hadn't had the presence of mind to even consider dinner. "Thank you very much."

"Don't thank me, you put an entire fucking pile together on the fly. This is just me being a spectacular, not-shitty example of a halfway decent moirail, for once," Karkat says with a huff. It takes some angling for him to lean over and not impale himself on one of her horns, but he reaches the tea and hands her the cup that's slightly darker in color. It's cooled and lukewarm now, at best, but Kanaya accepts it gratefully, her stiff hands folding around it and locking in place. Karkat has a significantly higher body temperature than her, and she is perfectly content to sip on cooled tea, leeching warmth all along one side while Karkat begins to busily rearrange the blankets. His own cup of tea sits at a precarious angle in the folds over a heavy knitted throw (courtesy of Rose), and winds up largely ignored, but thankfully Kanaya is already in a better mood, and finds it easier to forgive herself for choosing a tea Karkat doesn't really like in her haste to make something comforting and warm on short notice.

"We will need to get up shortly, anyway," she points out, when Karkat finishes turning her into a cocoon of blankets and flops back against the side of the couch.

Karkat pats her head with less hesitation, and she tilts it so that he can better sink fingers through her hair and start scritching at the base of her horns. She's part of the way to taking another sip of tea when he scratches the left hornbed just right, and a frisson of contentment runs through her, down to the marrow. The cup of tea dips to the side as her hands start to uncramp. "Like fuck. I can bring food over," Karkat says, half-offended, and Kanaya stifles her reaction so that all that comes out is a faint cough. "And more tea. Do you need more tea? Fuck, how long were you hanging around for? I should have come back sooner -"

Kanaya squirms an arm free and paps her palm against Karkat's cheek before he can hit his self-deprecating stride. "Shoosh."

A squawk emerges from Karkat's mouth. It's really the oddest noise. "No, shoosh at you," he retorts, equal parts offended and embarrassed as he starts papping her face right back, frowning with furious concentration as his other hand continues to scritch the base of her horns with renewed intent. "That's my line. Ugh. I'm sorry. Fuck. Tell me what happened today?"

The curtain at the open window flutters a little, the fresh air washing over them in a faint breeze, though she's too well wrapped up now to feel it on more than her face. Kanaya succeeds in bringing the cup of tea back up for one last sip and then mentally admits defeat, putting it down on solid ground at the edge of the pillows and turning her head again so that she can enjoy this properly. Karkat's claws press into the base of her horns with perfect pressure, light enough not to cut, deep enough to finally draw a faint, chittering purr out from low in her chest as the comfort sinks in. "I will tell you in a little while," she says, mumbling. "It is good to see you."


End file.
